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Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

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Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#71

Post by dijit »

mwcampbell wrote: post #67
bcantrill wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the only thing really inherent about our price point is that we're selling compute by the rack: as it turns out, a whole rack of server-class CPUs (and its accompanying DRAM, flash, NICs, and switching ASICs) is pretty expensive! But this doesn't mean that it's a luxury good: especially because customers won't need to buy software separately (as one does now for hypervisor, control plane, storage software, etc.),…

Where does this leave companies that would like to take advantage of fully integrated software and hardware (yes, intentionally referring to your old project at Sun), but don't need a full rack's worth of computing power (and maybe never will), and don't have the in-house skills to roll their own? Or do you think that what you're selling really only has significant benefits at a large scale?

I think the intention is that those people are better served with consolidated cloud providers? -- or even single digits of physical colocated servers.

It would be nice to have a known pricepoint from a cloud provider which once exceed you ask the question: "Should we buy a rack and COLO it?" Even if the answer is "no" it's still good to have that option.

---

The thing is: Datacenter technology has moved on from 2011 (when I was getting into Datacenters), but only for the big companies. (Google, Facebook, Netflix); I think Oxide is bringing the benefits of a "hyperscale" deployment to "normal" (IE; single/double-digit rack) customers.

Some of those things such as much more efficient DC converters, so not every machine needs to do it's own AC/DC conversion.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#72

Post by BaconPackets »

steveklabnik wrote: post #69
BaconPackets wrote: post #68

I'm currently reading up on this, but I'm struggling to match a use case. It's not Openstack. It's not VMware. It's not kubernetes. It's not proxmox. It's not Xen. It's not Anthos. It's not GCDE. It's not Outposts. So who and what is it for? Where is the use case that none of these other products fit the bill? Especially for an on premise use case.

This article is about technical details of the product that aren't user-facing. The business is fairly straightforward: we sell computers, a rack at a time. You as a customer can buy a rack, and put it in your data center. The rack offers an in-browser management console, built on top of an API you can use too. You use these tools to set up virtual machines. You can then use those VMs however you want. You get the cl…

Thanks! That gives me a bit more context.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#73

Post by nickdothutton »

There is still a place for fully integrated and engineered systems. If you have the need for high levels of concurrency, performance, availability, and need to know… not guess… what your opex is going to look like. I’m a user and supporter of cloud providers, but there are some fat, fat margins being booked there. Not every company can have a storage team, network team, and compute team to integrate those things properly.

0xide is one of the few really interesting new tech companies out there.

I have to admit some bias, as I was involved with a company offering a “poor mans vBlock” around 2010. We didn’t grow fast large but we never once lost a deal against commodity hardware vendors. They were easy to beat.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#74

Post by steveklabnik »

BaconPackets wrote: post #72
steveklabnik wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is about technical details of the product that aren't user-facing. The business is fairly straightforward: we sell computers, a rack at a time. You as a customer can buy a rack, and put it in your data center. The rack offers an in-browser management console, built on top of an API you can use too. You use these tools to set up virtual machines. You can then use those VMs however you want. You get the cl…

Thanks! That gives me a bit more context.

You're welcome! Sorry you're being downvoted, no idea what's up with that, it's a reasonable question. Sometimes our stuff can seem opaque, but that's because we're mostly focused on shipping right now, rather than marketing. Always happy to talk about stuff, though.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#75

Post by NexRebular »

wmf wrote: post #49
KerrAvon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible better security/performance through better architecture?

From what I've seen so far the same architecture could be achieved on Linux (e.g. Firecracker or Intel Cloud Hypervisor). To get great performance you often need to get elbow-deep in somebody else's driver and that may be just as much work as writing your own drivers.

Not everything has to run linux. There's enough of it in IT already.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#76

Post by NexRebular »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #23
porker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who got massively excited by SmartOS, only to see adoption never reach even the minimal levels I hoped for - yes, I hear you. What would the hosting story look like now if 8(?) years ago 25% of servers had adopted SmartOS?

I got massively excited by SmartOS, too. Coming from a vSphere and Hyper-V world I found it to be a joy to use. The way that Illumos zones leverage ZFS is really, really cool. The tooling in SmartOS was very nice to use, too. I never used it in production anywhere, admittedly. I also never got a chance to try out Triton. I'm on the fence about whether or not I keep my SmartOS hosts in my home network now that Illumos…

We run Triton and individual SmartOS boxes in production. They have pretty much replaced all of our VMWare and linux-based hypervisors save some very specific use cases, mostly relating to GPU passthrough and NVIDIA.

The case with OpenZFS does worry me as well. I fear the developers start slowly introducing linuxisms thus sacrificing portability and stability for the great penguin.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#77

Post by mwcampbell »

dijit wrote: post #71
mwcampbell wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does this leave companies that would like to take advantage of fully integrated software and hardware (yes, intentionally referring to your old project at Sun), but don't need a full rack's worth of computing power (and maybe never will), and don't have the in-house skills to roll their own? Or do you think that what you're selling really only has significant benefits at a large scale?

I think the intention is that those people are better served with consolidated cloud providers? -- or even single digits of physical colocated servers. It would be nice to have a known pricepoint from a cloud provider which once exceed you ask the question: "Should we buy a rack and COLO it?" Even if the answer is "no" it's still good to have that option. --- The thing is: Datacenter technology has moved on from 2011…

What's kind of messed up, at least for tiny companies like mine, is that renting an ugly PC-based dedicated server from a company like OVH is currently cheaper than paying for the equivalent computing power (edit: and outgoing data transfer) from a hyperscale cloud provider like AWS, even though the hyperscalers are probably using both space and power more efficiently than the likes of OVH. My cofounder will definitely not get on board with paying more to get the same (or less) computing power, just for the knowledge that we're (probably) using less energy. I don't know what the answer is; maybe we need some kind of regulation to make sure that the externalities of running a mostly idle box are properly factored into what we pay?

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#78

Post by BaconPackets »

steveklabnik wrote: post #74
BaconPackets wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! That gives me a bit more context.

You're welcome! Sorry you're being downvoted, no idea what's up with that, it's a reasonable question. Sometimes our stuff can seem opaque, but that's because we're mostly focused on shipping right now, rather than marketing. Always happy to talk about stuff, though.

:shrug: That's fine, I would always rather have a conversation. Thanks for your time!

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#79

Post by bitbckt »

zozbot234 wrote: post #34
wmf wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Oxide stack is good someone could make a name for themselves by porting it to Linux to get wider hardware support.

It might make even more sense to run a cutting-edge distributed OS on the actual Oxide hardware. With rack-scale platforms like this it could be feasible to do SSI with distributed memory across multiple "nodes". Current "cloud" platforms like Kubernetes are already planning on including support for automated checkpointing and migration, which is sort of the first step prior to going fully SSI.

I miss IRIX, too. :)

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#80

Post by zozbot234 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #77
dijit wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the intention is that those people are better served with consolidated cloud providers? -- or even single digits of physical colocated servers. It would be nice to have a known pricepoint from a cloud provider which once exceed you ask the question: "Should we buy a rack and COLO it?" Even if the answer is "no" it's still good to have that option. --- The thing is: Datacenter technology has moved on from 2011…

What's kind of messed up, at least for tiny companies like mine, is that renting an ugly PC-based dedicated server from a company like OVH is currently cheaper than paying for the equivalent computing power (edit: and outgoing data transfer) from a hyperscale cloud provider like AWS, even though the hyperscalers are probably using both space and power more efficiently than the likes of OVH. My cofounder will definite…

> renting an ugly PC-based dedicated server from a company like OVH is currently cheaper than renting the equivalent computing power from a hyperscale cloud provider like AWS

That's not surprising, you're basically paying for scalability. An idle box doesn't even necessarily "waste" all that much energy if it's truly idle, since "deep" power-saving states are used pretty much everywhere these days.

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